>it is however quite dangerous for a driver to do so. why?
>a better interface is a generic firmware loading API (or as generic as one >can be made, anyway) with a userspace firmware loader. agreed. its a rather tricky design however, because on a lot of hardware, you have to defer most of the driver initialization until the firmware load is complete. the h/w won't even talk to you "fully" until you've done this. this means you have a loaded device driver that is actually incapable of doing anything until a separate user-space application is invoked.
